Hi all,
Thanks so much for your patience!
We’re about to release the new and final patch for the Alpha. You can follow the release time here. After we release, we’ll be leaving the servers online until midnight 28 May (the end of Memorial Day). We will spend as much time playing as possible before we finish the Closed Alpha testing period. This time has been crucial for us to improve and refine aspects of the meta-game, as well as other technical issues that may arise. We’ve spent a long time assessing and reworking aspects of the title that we found unsatisfying - with the goal to make changes that would enrich the game in the long term - especially with the introduction of roles that would lessen the total infantry count on the front line.
CHANGE LOG
We have added strong point locations to each sector. These are locations within the sector in which your contributing capture value as a player is doubled. It is possible to capture a sector without entering a strong point, however they are designed to give defenders a greater ability to control a sector and to cut down on “six men in a bush” captures. Strong points are marked on the map. A yellow arrow will appear in the center of your capture progress wheel when you enter a strong point.
OPs and Garrisons cannot be placed in locked enemy sectors. If an enemy sector becomes locked, your OP or Garrison in that sector will be destroyed.
The Recon Unit has been introduced. These are 2 man units designed to penetrate the enemy lines and gather intelligence on troop movements, enemy spawn locations - as well as harass important enemy targets via the use of the long range optic. Be careful though - while the sniper rifle is an incredibly powerful and deadly tool, taking any suppressive fire will force you to reposition. You’ll also quickly become swamped by a full infantry unit. We are aware that the Recon unit will be incredibly powerful without vehicles or indirect fire in the game - especially in a map like St Marie Du Mont. We will be testing and working on these units to expand their functionality away from simply killing. Both of the scoped rifles have slight animation issues that will be fixed. Bullet travel time is unnoticeable, and this will be tweaked to incorporate a better ballistic model that will force you to lead your target. The Recon unit is the ONLY unit that can place an OP in a locked enemy sector.
You can now select which sector in your line you wish to spawn in. Click on your team shield in that sector to deploy. When one of your line sectors is captured by the enemy, the spawn point will disappear.
The personal scoreboard has now been implemented. We will be adding new fields to this continuously. It’s designed for you to track your progress and contribution to the battle in a way that’s both fun and informative. We also know that competitive players will want to see a more detailed breakdown of their contribution. Your personal scoreboard can be viewed at the end of battle by clicking on “Show Detailed”. Eventually this will feed into a stats page and allow you to track these over the course of every game you play.
Our first iteration of the MG overheat and tracer system has been applied to the M1919 and the MG42. There are issues with it currently and many ways it will be improved.
Frag grenade FX have been updated. These will continue to be worked on.
You can now cancel deployment.
Player counts in the server browser are now correctly reported.
Steady aim has now been applied to all rifles (G43, M1 Carbine, M1 Garand, 1903 Springfield, K98k, K98k Scoped). Hold shift while ADS to steady aim.
US and German Machine Gunner character model are now in the game.
A large number of head bobs and transitions have been tidied up to make the game feel more fluid and natural.
Resource accumulation has been increased to allow battles to continue for the intended length of time and to make breakthrough victories possible.
We have worked through near 700 client crash reports and 7 server crash reports and fixed all issues. We expect more issues to arise - particularly as we bring in more features.
We have begun our overhaul of buildings as we bring them to production quality. Our new three story building and several other structures have begun being placed in St Marie, and we will continue to be placing new buildings with finished interiors in the lead up to Early Access. St Marie Du Mont particularly will look very, very different and the whole experience will be more optimized.
KNOWN ISSUES
End of round issues persist - crashing, freezing and not properly transporting the game state. These will be fixed over the coming weeks.
Some rag-doll issues (jumpiness - twitching).
Green flickering in full-screen mode.
SFX is still incomplete.
Animation has bugs or are incomplete.
There are other miscellaneous bugs and issues that we'll be fixing as we continue development.
MOVING FORWARD
We have our work cut out for us! We've begun work on base artillery, refining vehicles and establishing a universal set of systems that will be applied to each one. This includes our armor penetration system and a better ballistic model that will be mapped to heavy weapons. We're also currently working on finishing up Hurtgen to make it ready for internal testing by the end of this week. Foy is close behind this, and the new building overhaul will affect the speed, optimization, aesthetics and gameplay in all of these maps. Smoke grenades are ready to go and we regret not being able to include them in the Alpha. They need one level of optimization to make sure they appear correctly on the lowest FX setting. On top of these things, we have large chunks of animation to complete - refining transitions and any visual issues. We're now on to the next set of character models, and hope that by the time we reach EA both the US and German forces will have entirely unique character models for each role.
While the Closed Alpha will be ending, you can expect Beta weekend events in which you as testers will be able to play on the new maps with all new features. We will broadcast these events via our Discord, the Forums and to applicable Kickstarter backer tiers.
There are many other things that will change, be refined or polished as we push towards Early Access and we're very excited for what's to come!